Hand movement investigations inspired by Yarbus

Inspired by the work of Yarbus on eye movements, we investigated the dependence of hand movements on “scene” and question about the scene. Our haptic scenes consisted of arrays of 3×3 samples of materials that could differ in material properties or orientation of texture. Questions we asked our participants were, for example, “Describe the relief” or “Which sample is warmest?”. Our results show that different questions lead to very distinctive movement patterns, such as a series of “static touches” or local “back and forth movements”. Interestingly, different participants produce remarkably similar movement patterns.